President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, the president’s daughter Ivanka, and Small Business Administration head Linda McMahon met with a group of highly successful women entrepreneurs at the White House, Monday, March 27. They shared their stories about their triumphs and the challenges they had overcome.
The president explained that promoting women in business was a priority in his administration, recognizing “how crucial women are as job creators, role models, and leaders all throughout our communities.”
Vice President Pence noted that women ran 9.4 million businesses employing 8 million Americans, and generating $1.5 trillion in revenue annually.
Ivanka Trump told the ladies how thrilled she was to have met them and learned their stories, and how meeting in the White House was the perfect culmination of Women’s History Month.
Present at the meeting were:Lisa Nichols, CEO and co-founder of Technology Partners, a national provider of premier IT staffing and solutions; Claudia Mirza , CEO of Akorbi, a multilingual business communications firm operating around the world, Shirley Ann Perry, owner of HydroTech, a company engaged in environmental cleanups and environmental consulting; Lisa Phillips, founder of Celebrate Us, a company providing elaborate parties for working class families who deserved to be made to feel special but simply could not afford to celebrate. Some of her work force were recruited and trained from among the homeless; Amy Pope-Wells, owner of Link Staffing, who also owns the company Tire Diva; Liliana Gil Valletta, founder of CIEN+, cross-cultural marketing and big data analytics company; Patricia Funegra, founder of La Cocina VA, an organization that provides vocational and technical education and jobs to unemployed and under-employed immigrant women; Suzie Scanlon Rabinowitz, co-founder and managing director of an alternative legal model providing full- and part-time counsel to Fortune 500 companies; Dyan Gibbens, head of Trumbell Unmanned, a Houston-based, Forbes Top 25 company providing critical data to the energy sector; and Jessica Johnson-Cope, president and CEO of Johnson Security Bureau.
Each of the business owners spoke briefly about how and why she set out to create new businesses. Ivanka Trump also emphasized that while these ladies were noteworthy for creating and growing such successful and important businesses, they were equally powerful as forces in building their communities, either directly by providing jobs or by providing the examples of what a person with determination could do.
